pom pom

Today’s the day – Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you’re all having a lovely day and have eaten your weight in chocolate and cheese and are having a good rest. If your wee ones (or your big ones!) have already tired of some of their presents, then I have a very quick little Christmas decoration tutorial for you all.

Everyone meet Gerald, the pom pom Christmas reindeer! This is a quick wee make that hopefully the kids will manage, with some adult supervision, of course.

Materials

Yarn or wool. It doesn’t really matter what kind, or what colour, but I used brown for realism. Please feel free to make rainbow reindeer!

Red felt. I buy whole sheets from local crafty places for about 50p, but you only need a little to make a nose.

Googly eyes. I use ones that you peel that backing off and it sticks to anything.

Sticky tape.

A pair of scissors

Cardboard or a pom pom maker. I used a pom pom maker because I am super into crafts and like to buy useless stuff.

Pipe cleaners

Instructions

Firstly, make a pom pom. I presume everyone knows how to make a pom pom with cardboard, but if not there are lots of tutorials on Youtube. I will put links in to tutorials at the end of the blog.

If you don’t know how to make one, you basically get two pieces of cardboard, cut them into circles of equal size, and make a fairly large hole in the middle. Put the pieces of card together and then wrap the yarn/wool around the circles, going through the hole in the middle and round the outside. Once the circles are completely covered in a fairly thick layer of yarn, you then have to cut the yarn. To do this, I get a pair of scissors and hold the cardboard circles so that I’m looking down on top, i.e. like a bird’s eye view of a tyre on a car, as opposed to looking at a tyre lying flat on the ground. I then put the scissors roughly in the middle and cut down, trying to find the split where the two sides of cardboard meet. Then cut along this split all the way round. You’ll be left with lots of little bits of yarn all poking out. Keep a good hold of that cardboard! You need to wrap a length of yarn around all those little bits, so put the length in between the cardboard bits and then basically tie it as tight as you can. This is where the pom pom can go wrong – if that piece of yarn isn’t tied tight enough, your little yarn bits will all fall out and you won’t have a pom pom!

Tie it really tight a few times and then you want to make a loop with the end, to be able to hang Gerald on your tree. I just tie a knot in the yarn quite low down and it gets hidden in amongst the pom pom.

The next step to a pom pom is to remove the cardboard, but HOLD ON! We’ll do that in a minute, but first we want to make a start on those reindeer antlers! I put a pipe cleaner in the middle of the pom pom, basically through the hole in the middle and then you can remove the cardboard. You should be left with a pom pom with two ends of pipe cleaner coming out of the middle. I then bend the pipe cleaners so they stick up, like antennae.

You can leave the antlers like this if you like, to make something similar to calf antlers, of you can add more pipe cleaners and make cow or bull antlers. I just twist the pipe cleaners round the sticking up pipe cleaners and bend them into shape and I ended up with this.

Starting to look a little like a reindeer now! Next, we need to cut out a nose for our reindeer. I went for red, but you can do whatever colour you like. Just cut a wee circle out of your felt.

I then get my sticky tape and cut a little bit off. I bend it on itself to make it double-sided and stick it on the back of my nose. I then place my nose on my pom pom.

The next step is to put your googly eyes on Gerald. I just chose a nice big pair and stuck them on!

And finally, hang him on your tree!

Admire your handiwork and enjoy the rest of the festive period!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from all of us at the Reindeer Centre.